A Long Day in Lychford (Lychford #3)(12)
“Of course I’m not bloody—! Sorry. What she was saying, about what I’d done, how . . . I guess, bad magicians? How they use this stuff? Am I going to ‘the dark side’?” Lizzie could hear the irony she’d put into the words. “Like I’m becoming the stuff we’re keeping out. Which is . . . what they’ve been saying to me, or not ever saying out loud. What they’ve been thinking.”
Lizzie didn’t like the sound in her friend’s voice. “You’ve been under a lot of pressure, and I haven’t been listening enough.”
“I want to confess.”
“Well, we don’t do that very much in the C of E, but absolutely, you can confess to me and I can—”
“I don’t want to be absolved. I want to take responsibility for this. Do you think there’s some sort of . . . magical court, maybe with the fairies?”
“Shut up!” called Judith from ahead. “Move faster.” They came to a grassy patch in the middle of the field, which stood out in the middle of the crop. Now they’d stopped running, Lizzie could still hear the distant dance music. Judith squatted slowly down and picked up two spades, which Lizzie was pretty sure hadn’t been there a second before. “Dig,” she said, “quick.”
Autumn grabbed a spade, and set about digging. She was trying to demonstrate her commitment. “Those threads you saw wrapped around me,” she said, “won’t me moving about keep on disturbing them?”
Judith made a tutting noise, like this question was an unwanted burden. “The web of them is loose now. Dun’t matter what you do.”
Lizzie saw pain pass across Judith’s face once more. “Are you okay? Doing all this, running like that, you have to pay a price, don’t you? That’s how it works.”
Judith gave her a look that said further questions along those lines would be most unwise.
Lizzie sighed and started to dig. “How is there a grassy patch here?” She wasn’t going to let Judith or Autumn lapse into brooding.
“Paul the builder is one of that lot that goes out with metal detectors. He thinks he found summat huge out here a few months back. He’s got an agreement with Joe Tatchell to not sow on this bit, and he’ll poke around after harvest.”
“And what’s that got to do with what we’re doing?”
“He found an illusion I’d planted at this spot so he’d do all that. In case we ever had to do this. I’m up for fighting the powers of evil, but I’m not so stupid as I’d take on a farmer.”
“But what happens when he realises it’s not here?”
“I know what that lot with the detectors are like. He’d have kept poking around for it, year after year. So the spot’d stay put. Right. That’s deep enough.” She took from her cardigan pocket a tiny cloth bag with thread knotted at the top. “I kept these in the freezer. I had to put them in the oven when I realised what she’d done.”
She’d addressed that explanation only to her, Lizzie realised. It was as if Autumn had become useful only for digging. Autumn had realised that too, and was looking helpless. “And they got into your pocket how?” asked Lizzie.
Judith gave her another look. “What do they call him, the green chap?”
“Is that someone we know, or—?”
“On schoolbags. He were on television when I were younger.” It took a bit of interrogation before Lizzie realised Judith was talking about The Incredible Hulk. “Right. Him. If I go like him, knock me around the head with the brown-handled spade. That should fix it.” And before either of them could ask any alarmed questions, even about why it had to be that particular spade, she’d put the cloth of the bag to her lips and started to blow into it.
Lizzie and Autumn looked at each other. “You’ve got the brown-handled spade,” said Lizzie.
Autumn quickly swapped spades with her.
Judith’s face was changing colour, but it was turning bright red rather than green. She seemed to have been blowing for an impossibly long time, drawing air from who knew where. Lizzie took a covert look behind the old woman and saw that her floral dress had flattened against the back of her legs, as if being pulled in by . . . no, she really didn’t want to think about that.
Judith finally stopped, staggered, righted herself, and, with a little cry of pain, threw the bag into the hole. Light burst from where it struck the soil, and a pillar of it shot up into the sky, a light only they could see. Then it began to slowly fan out, dissipating into a vague glow that followed an arc.
“Basic defence,” panted Judith. “Until . . . if . . . we can knit the boundaries back into place . . . it’ll have to do.”
“So now do we go after the lost people?” asked Autumn.
“In a bit.” Judith looked like she didn’t like speaking directly to Autumn now. She also looked on her last legs, her face grey with effort. “We’ve got three more of these to do first.”
*
They raced around Lychford in the heat, putting the cloth bags into prepared sites that were, in order: inside the bole of a tree; by the side of a road, which needed a paving stone to be heaved up and got them curious shouts from drivers; in the playground underneath the slide, which required more digging. All the while, the distant beat of the dance music continued.